Happy Halloween, Baby

SteelyKid says “Daddy, I can help with your puppet show. Look at this awesome dragon puppet Grandma got me!” In this, you can also see a bit of the Halloween outfit her great-grandmother gave her. There are a couple of pictures below the fold that show it more clearly:

Links for 2009-10-31

A Plea for Peaceful Coexistence – The Pour Blog – NYTimes.com “Beer and wine are not in competition. Yet people in the wine business, who I assure you drink an awful lot of beer, don’t often take it seriously as a beverage. And people in the beer business, perhaps in reaction to not-so-imaginary slights, rarely… Continue reading Links for 2009-10-31

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DonorsChoose: The Final Days -or- You’ll Get Your Puppet Show

Last week, I promised to do a puppet show if my DonorsChoose challenge entry claimed more than 1% of the $200,000 that Hewlett-Packard is donating to this year’s Social Media Challenge. If you’re quick with arithmetic, you’ll see that the puppet-show threshold was $2,000. The actual contribution was $4,064.70, more than double the threshold amount.… Continue reading DonorsChoose: The Final Days -or- You’ll Get Your Puppet Show

I Know They Show Beer Commercials in Hell

It’s fall, which means that the major American sports are all ramping up (baseball is in its brief period of being interesting, the NFL is nearing the middle of its season, the NBA has just gotten underway, which means that real basketball will start soon). This also means that the major advertisers have rolled out… Continue reading I Know They Show Beer Commercials in Hell

Links for 2009-10-30

Pimp My Novel: Tip O’ the Week: Chasing Trends “If you’re currently penning a fantasy novel centering on a pious zombie vampire from an alternate 19th century in which science/alchemy/the Bible has predicted the earth’s impending doom, uh, please send it to me, because that could be awesome. More importantly, though, stop doing it.” (tags:… Continue reading Links for 2009-10-30

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Rule 1 of Writing: Try Not to Sound Like a Doofus

Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled “7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School,” which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty: What is good writing? Ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you good writing is… Continue reading Rule 1 of Writing: Try Not to Sound Like a Doofus

Links for 2009-10-29

Sexist Beatdown: The Happy Hooker, Or Why Doesn’t Steven Levitt Suck Dick For a Living? – The Sexist – Washington City Paper “[E]ven though our two Steves are really brilliant economists, they just can’t figure out why most of us women don’t want to have sex for tons and tons of money. Why aren’t more… Continue reading Links for 2009-10-29

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Guest Post: Choosing the Nobel Prize winners is not an exact science

Some time back, commenter HI won a guest post by predicting the Nobel laureates in Medicine. He sent me the text a little while ago, and I’ve finally gotten around to posting it (things have been crazy around here): Since Chad gave me the right to guest blog as a prize for correctly predicting the… Continue reading Guest Post: Choosing the Nobel Prize winners is not an exact science